Truly it’s the belligerent passengers that are the worst though. Most often on a British train there’s a sense of shared suffering, and people usually pitch in to help the doddery old lady to her seat, or the mother with a child and a heavy bag. If the train is packed or the air conditioning is broken (and in summer it’s usually both at once), there are quiet jokes shared amongst strangers at tables about how crazy it all is. The mad passenger fighting with their huge luggage up the carriage gets an exchange of knowing looks and a smile, from people glad that they’re already settled in their seats and don’t have to get involved.
The belligerent passengers though, they can spoil it for everyone, even those already installed in their seats and trying to block out the world with earphones and a book or laptop. Inevitably it’s a grumpy passenger looking to take out their frustrations on someone else, be they deserving or not. The luggage rack isn’t big enough. Someone stole my seat. The train is late so I’ll miss my connection. And so because they are suffering, the rest of the passengers must too. Complaining loudly and bitterly of course is known to accelerate the train and make up that delay, and expand the luggage rack. Or maybe it just compounds the misery which is probably already being felt by the other passengers, who have already accepted the fact that they are running late. And as for finding someone sitting in your seat, apologetically pointing this out will get you far further with a minimum of fuss.

I’m fairly sure that I’m not an especially lucky traveller. I have a decent share of missed or late trains, and while it doesn’t exactly make me the cheeriest soul in the world, I try to bear it with good grace. But I’ve never had a problem with luggage space, or seat reservations, or half of the things that plague these passengers, so I can’t help but feel that there’s some sort of karma working itself through there. It might seem petty, but I find myself thinking “Good”, when someone has missed a connection and has decided to take it out on a conductor who clearly has nothing to do with their problem.

As troubling as it is to witness the sheer unbridled ignorance and lack of concern for the effects their actions have on others that some of the passengers show though, it is at least comforting to see that the majority of my fellow travellers are actually just nice people. They just want to get to their destination with the minimum of fuss, like me.

One of the fringe benefits of travelling to client sites regularly is the amount of people-watching you get to do. And in the words of the late, great Bill Hicks: there are some real pockets of humanity out there, it’s amazing to see them travelling around.

You can spot the regular travellers of course, they tend to be quite quiet, keep to themselves. They know exactly where they are going, they know which cars on the train are which and how the seat reservation system works. In general they get on the train and settle down quickly, surrounding themselves with the trappings of the regular traveller – the laptop or MP3 player comes out instantly and gets arranged artfully in front of them. On the morning trains down to Cheshire I’ve seen people get on, set up their space and have their head leaning against the window close to snoring, before the train has even left Edinburgh Waverley. Now that is a professional traveller.

On the flip side you get the occasional travellers, who are easily marked out early on by the fact that they come on, wandering down the aisle and staring at each and every number in turn for a few seconds before moving on. Which is odd really, given how little information is on there. Read the number. Does it match your number? No? Then keep moving until it does. There’s four seats in every row, if your number is 48 and you’re just passing 4, then you don’t need to stop and check every row, you’re at the wrong part of the carriage. If it matches? Then sit down, or at least move out of the way so the dozen people patiently (or not so patiently) standing behind you waiting to get past to their own seats can get along. In particular, don’t stare at the seat number, look at the seat, at the seat number again, then look around and see if you like the other seats nearby better.

Couples and families are especially bad for this. It’s not rocket science, you’d think, getting to your seat and sitting down. But watching a pair of grandparents with a young child going up and down a carriage, dithering over where to go, because there’s someone else  sitting in the unreserved seat of their table for four; well – it’s excruciating to watch. Sometimes the conductor happens along while they’re still dithering, and I don’t envy their job at all. You can see the distress on their face as they try to resist the urge to shake the errant passengers by the shoulders and shout “Just sit down! It’s not that hard!”

Families are also the worst for the crazy bag sizes, which is great fun to watch, as long as you’re not sitting by the luggage racks. At a distance though, it’s great to watch them trying to manage with a bag big enough to fit a small child in. From the moment they get on the carriage and struggle to even get their bags through the doors, you know there’s going to be a dilemma before they get to sit down. And sure enough, they eventually get to the rack, banging peoples elbows and ankles along the way, only to find that it’s already pretty full of normal sized bags. Then they huff and puff and half-heartedly push other bags around, even though it’s clear that the only way they’re getting their bags in is to throw all the others from the train and hope no-one notices. With couples and families though, you get a further treat, which is to watch them turn to each other and start complaining that there’s never enough room for bags on the train (or for bonus points – complain at their partner that they’ve packed too much stuff). As if it’s somehow the train company’s fault for not accommodating their giant-sized luggage. The more belligerent amongst them will even start asking around if other people could move their bags instead – only to be greeted with shocked stares and disbelief at their gall.

(to be continued…)

Yes, back from the roaming around the States, although my body’s clock still says I’m somewhere in the mid Atlantic I think. Hotel wi-fi access was pretty sporadic sadly, even the places that charged 10 USD a day for internet access were pretty flaky and hard to connect to. And goodness knows how much malware and traffic snooping was going on. Suffice to say that any sensitive stuff was entered via LogMeIn to the office machine so it wasn’t out in the open.

Anyway, that paranoia aside, I certainly got less blogging than I wanted to done, as I was going to catch up on my backlog. That in itself was probably good though, in that I got more time enjoying the holiday (and the generalised madness that is being a tourist in the USA) instead.

Everyone has seemed to get along just fine without me anyway, the clients all seemed quite happy with the work getting done, none of the team got ill or went crazy, and the office didn’t burn down. So all in all a successful trip away. Lot’s of paperwork and admin to catch up on though, and getting back up to speed with our 3 projects.

One of the biggest problems with running your own business is handling illness and time off. You get used to driving the business forward, dealing with all the clients, making sure everyone knows what they’re doing and that there aren’t any hidden snags waiting. So when you get ill, it’s hard to switch off and give yourself time to recover, because you know that there are a whole bunch of things that need doing and if you don’t deal with them then they just won’t get done. And that’s been my curse – a bad cold in early July, which took a week to clear, but left me with a crippling, wracking cough that still hasn’t shifted. The cough in turn causes sleepless nights, and so leaves me generally grumpy (well, grumpier than usual) and less able to work. And of course there’s so much to be done that I can’t readily give myself days off to help the recovery, which makes the whole thing worse.

Couple the illness with preparations for an upcoming three week holiday around the US, and I’ve been run ragged for the last month, which really isn’t good. On the other hand, it’s forced me to make sure that the rest of the team are good to keep working on their own without me micro-managing everything.

Being ill has radically cut down on my ability to tackle the little additional things that I normally do in addition to the regular day-to-day work of the Company though, hence the blogging hiatus. It remains on the to-do list, every day taunting me by being something I really want to do, but never being high enough on the priorities to actually get done.

It’s also meant that my enjoyment of the EIF this year was radically cut down. But thankfully the venue was just a few hundred yards along the road from our office, which made it much easier to both attend and still be on top of our normal work. I’ll write up my impressions from the talks as usual, but that may have to wait until later in the week.

We’ve also taken on work for a new client – another WiiWare development, which is good as it helps us cement our understanding of the platform. But that is mostly going to rest in the hands of Tim and Pete as I go off travelling from Friday. Our hotels mostly have wi-fi connections (I think I’d probably go insane if I didn’t have net access for three weeks) so I’ll be talking with the office over Skype and email in case of emergencies. But hopefully I’ll be able to relax and remember what life outside of work is all about!

So our accountant (who happens to work in the same building as us) popped his head round the door this morning inquiring about when I was going to sort out our 2007/08 accounts. Cue a frenzied morning of tallying, checking of figures, amending totals, and now we have our accounts finalised (finally). They don’t really need to be done until much later in the year, since the deadline is the end of January for filing, but I always say that I’m going to sort them out at the end of April once all the figures are in, and invariably get distracted and have to be reminded.

A decent profit was made this year, despite my best efforts to hide it with last minute devkit and hardware purchases, so our money-grubbing government will take a slice of it this year (boo, hiss). Somehow I’ll find it in me to live with that though. 🙂

Just been looking over the E3 content from this year though – so thoroughly un-inspiring that I’m not even going to bother linking to any of it. Suffice to say that there’s not really anything that I’m head over heels about, although id’s new trailer was good-looking enough to raise an eyebrow, even if I’m not convinced that it’s anything other than a tech demo at the moment.

Things in the office are trundling along much as usual, with our previous prototypes close to running properly on the devkit. We’re toing and froing about the direction the prototypes will take at the moment, but I’m just eager to get stuck in and try new things.

They say that your opinion of someone elses intelligence is pretty much solely based on how much they agree with your views. Well if that’s the case, then Clinton Keith over at Agile Game Development must be pretty damned smart. This post covers pretty much exactly what I’ve said previously about the rising cost vs. stagnant demand for big-budget games, except with pretty graphs and actual numbers. Psshaw – who needs statistics when you have hunches and rhetoric.

Nothing that I’ve seen in the last 2 years has shifted my views on the likely fate of big-budget retail titles, although we haven’t seen a wholesale collapse in that sector of the market, so its likely things aren’t all that bad. Down here at the shallow end of the pond though it is small affordable to develop (and buy) titles all the way. We’re getting ever closer to getting our prototypes up and running on the console kit, but I won’t be happy until I can start tinkering properly and see the results on the television. Our story-board is shifting nicely over to the ‘done’ column though, so it will soon be time to re-fill the board with more significant and less engine-related stories.

Note to self though – follow up our post on the one true handed-ness with one on the one true endian-ness. Big endian is not our friend!

I was debating with myself over whether or not to attach a picture of our Wii development kit to this post to add a bit of colour. In the end I decided not to, as you could probably construe it as a breach of our promise to Nintendo to keep everything super-secret and hidden. Boo-hiss. Anyway, suffice it to say that we’re taking advantage of a lull in our work-for-hire burden to devote to our own game prototyping. For future reference, I’m going to talk about it as Biscuit, because that’s the name I use in all of our planning documentation. The name doesn’t really have any relation to the work we’re doing, I just liked the idea of a biscuit powered engine.

Conjures up all sorts of images. 🙂 So yes, the development kit has been dusted off, the stories board has been cleaned out and refilled with relevant story cards, and we are ploughing through the mountain of documentation for the Wii and getting stuck into getting our test game ported over. Much fun!

In other news, since he made grumbling noises when I asked him to write a blog post, I feel compelled to announce Pete’s news that he managed a First from his Software Engineering degree – we’re all quite proud. So I think that’s three Firsts and a Masters for Charlotte: I wonder if that qualifies for some sort of tax break. Probably not. :-/

A month without a post! That’s just not on. Bad Chris, bad! At first it was because I wanted to write a good post about our new team members! But then it was all about the long hours I was putting in for our Four Door Lemon work, to help them get a title out of the door. It’s never nice when you’re so busy you don’t have time for the little stuff, but I’m hopeful that things quieten down a bit now.

So yes: new staff! As I mentioned before, Charlotte Moseley and Tim Angus have joined Pete and I, to make a nice round number of four. They’ve both been beavering away in the office since the start of May.

Even better, now Pete is finally putting his degree course to bed, he’ll be joining us in the office full time as well. So definitely a full house, since our office is only really big enough to fit four people comfortably. We shall have to see about some bigger space at some point soon, so we have room to grow when we next feel the need to.

We couldn’t let the first day with all four of us in the office go by without marking the occasion though, so I shooed everyone out of the office and round the corner to the Mercat for some celebratory drinks. The wonderful thing about having an office in the centre of Edinburgh is the ready access to nice places to eat and drink after work. Apologies for the grainy picture quality, but I only had my phone camera with me, having stupidly forgotten to bring the proper one! And of course I’m the cameraman, so it’s not a proper team photo. I’m sure we’ll sort one of them out soon.

Quick rule of thumb for anyone wanting to court Scottish games (or regular) developers: If you promise coffee and/or breakfast, make sure 1) the coffee doesn’t run out, and 2) the breakfast consists of carbohydrates. And no, chocolate Hob Nobs don’t count as breakfast. Bonus points for the saw player though, she was good, and it was a suitably random intermission!

Some pictures from the mingling here. I’m not in any of them thankfully, as I was somewhat hung over (and the short supply of coffee wasn’t doing anything to help matters), but you can spot Mr Baglow of Indoctrimat/SG.biz and Andrew Richards of CodePlay in the background of one picture at least. Still, some interesting mingling and people to meet, including the folks from Glasgow-based WeeWorld and some other small local developers who I didn’t know existed.

Interesting article here from the Rampant Coyote; also on our blog-roll, so I thought I’d jump them up the order. Basically it is bemoaning the fact that games developers are in a losing business right now. Well, those who are in the traditional publisher-fronts-all-money-as-advance-against-sales model are at least. I wouldn’t like to speculate on whether or not other developers are profitable or not, but the sales input versus development costs mis-match is something I’ve harped on about here before.

Rampant Games itself is an indie games portal/developer, with a wide range of games, all developed by independents. I haven’t actually played any of the games I must admit, but I still cheer for independent developers who stake out their territory and do well there. The blog is a mix of opinion pieces and development stories, but personally I like it for the in-depth coverage of the progress of their new game (Frayed Knights), which looks quite fun and is just entering the beta stage now.